The village, on the outskirts of which we had taken up our abode, was built parallel to the cliff line above the shore, but half a mile inland.  For a long time after the date I have now reached, no other form of natural scenery than the sea had any effect upon me at all.  The tors of the distant moor might be drawn in deep blue against the pallor of our morning or our evening sky, but I never looked at them.  It was the Sea, always the sea, nothing but the sea.  From our house, or from the field at the back of our house, or from any part of the village itself, there was no appearance to suggest that there could lie anything in an easterly direction to break the infinitude of red ploughed fields.  But on that earliest morning, how my heart remembers we hastened,—­Miss Marks, the maid, and I between them, along a couple of high-walled lanes, when suddenly, far below us, in an immense arc of light, there stretched the enormous plain of waters.  We had but to cross a step or two of downs, when the hollow sides of the great limestone cove yawned at our feet, descending, like a broken cup, down, down to the moon of snow-white shingle and the expanse of blue-green sea.

In these twentieth-century days, a careful municipality has studded the down with rustic seats and has shut its dangers out with railings, has cut a winding carriage-drive round the curves of the cove down to the shore, and has planted sausage-laurels at intervals in clearings made for that aesthetic purpose.  When last I saw the place, thus smartened and secured, with its hair in curl-papers and its feet in patent-leathers, I turned from it in anger and disgust, and could almost have wept.  I suppose that to those who knew it in no other guise, it may still have beauty.  No parish councils, beneficent and shrewd, can obscure the lustre of the waters or compress the vastness of the sky.  But what man could do to make wild beauty ineffectual, tame and empty, has amply been performed at Oddicombe.

Very different was it fifty years ago, in its uncouth majesty.  No road, save the merest goat-path, led down its concave wilderness, in which loose furze-bushes and untrimmed brambles wantoned into the likeness of trees, each draped in audacious tissue of wild clematis.  Through this fantastic maze the traveller wound his way, led by little other clue than by the instinct of descent.  For me, as a child, it meant the labour of a long, an endless morning, to descend to the snow-white pebbles, to sport at the edge of the cold, sharp sea, and then to climb up home again, slipping in the sticky red mud, clutching at the smooth boughs of the wild ash, toiling, toiling upwards into flat land out of that hollow world of rocks.

On the first occasion I recollect, our Cockney housemaid, enthusiastic young creature that she was, flung herself down upon her knees, and drank of the salt waters.  Miss Marks, more instructed in phenomena, refrained, but I, although I was perfectly aware what the taste would be, insisted on sipping a few drops from the palm of my hand.  This was a slight recurrence of what I have called my ‘natural magic’ practices, which had passed into the background of my mind, but had not quite disappeared.  I recollect that I thought I might secure some power of walking on the sea, if I drank of it—­a perfectly irrational movement of mind, like those of savages.